Monday, February 11, 2008

Black Ops

Intermittently, some self-styled "progressive" will attack an opposing viewpoint by claiming that it shows the repressed homosexuality of its advocate. Most of the left is not happy with these tactics, and of course the right greets them with contempt.

Despite their lack of apparent impact, these appear frequently enough that it is worth understanding them. The posters imagine that they are saying something which, if widely known, would be devastating: they cannot accurately gauge what the reaction of real conservatives would be, but they can gleefully imagine the reaction of the straw-man conservatives they simulate internally.

These accusations are meant to be a kind of information warfare, making conservatives turn against their own. This shows the perils of undertaking this kind of operation without at least some understanding of the enemy.